Mark Deeks wrote:Innis's idea for Nasty Letters was to work in the No E's idea that I mentioned a few posts back. I think it's a good idea, as, as of right now, nasty letters are no different.

The problem with that is that it would make the current high scores for any Nasty format with letters basically invincible.

You could just reclassify existing Nasty Numbers 15s and 9s as Old Nasty Numbers 15 Rounders and Old Nasty Numbers 9 Rounders, then start afresh with a new, nastier letters distribution. The old records would still be there in the stats, like when Hyper Numbers Attack went from 30 second rounds to 45 second rounds, all the old 30 second games are still in the database as "Old Hypernumbers Attacks".

Mark Deeks wrote:Innis's idea for Nasty Letters was to work in the No E's idea that I mentioned a few posts back. I think it's a good idea, as, as of right now, nasty letters are no different.

The problem with that is that it would make the current high scores for any Nasty format with letters basically invincible.

You could just reclassify existing Nasty Numbers 15s and 9s as Old Nasty Numbers 15 Rounders and Old Nasty Numbers 9 Rounders, then start afresh with a new, nastier letters distribution. The old records would still be there in the stats, like when Hyper Numbers Attack went from 30 second rounds to 45 second rounds, all the old 30 second games are still in the database as "Old Hypernumbers Attacks".

Good idea Jim. Maybe the letters could be upside down / inverted or flash on and off like in blind conundrums, although both of those suggestions are ludicrously unnecessary and the latter would probably need a health warning.

Mark Deeks wrote:Innis's idea for Nasty Letters was to work in the No E's idea that I mentioned a few posts back. I think it's a good idea, as, as of right now, nasty letters are no different.

The problem with that is that it would make the current high scores for any Nasty format with letters basically invincible.

You could just reclassify existing Nasty Numbers 15s and 9s as Old Nasty Numbers 15 Rounders and Old Nasty Numbers 9 Rounders, then start afresh with a new, nastier letters distribution. The old records would still be there in the stats, like when Hyper Numbers Attack went from 30 second rounds to 45 second rounds, all the old 30 second games are still in the database as "Old Hypernumbers Attacks".

Yeah, I guess. If I'm gonna do that I'd want to put a bit more effort into getting the new revision right, maybe making more substantial changes to the letter distribution. Will think about it.

It would be interesting for someone to go through this topic and pick out everything which was suggested but didn't happen (except for things I explictly said no to). I might do it myself if no one else feels like it.

Charlie Reams wrote:It would be interesting for someone to go through this topic and pick out everything which was suggested but didn't happen (except for things I explictly said no to). I might do it myself if no one else feels like it.

I've thought about doing that a couple of times, half to be useful and half to deliberately not bring up certain shit ideas, but then always decided against it because you might think I was being pushy rather than helpful. If no one else does it, I'll get round to it.

Charlie Reams wrote:It would be interesting for someone to go through this topic and pick out everything which was suggested but didn't happen (except for things I explictly said no to). I might do it myself if no one else feels like it.

I've thought about doing that a couple of times, half to be useful and half to deliberately not bring up certain shit ideas, but then always decided against it because you might think I was being pushy rather than helpful. If no one else does it, I'll get round to it.

Please, for my sanity, can the Numbers Rounds be changed so that you automatically declare the exact target (and thus get a chance to enter your solution via the number-clicking) if you have otherwise made no declaration. (In other worse, you should automatically start in a position of declaring the exact target, and you have to type in the box to declare anything different.) This is because about 1 round in 100, I forget to click the target number when I've solved the round, thus scoring zero, invariably at some crucial moment. It's driving me absolutely crackers, and not in a positive way.

I can't see how there could be any opposition to autodeclaring the exact target, as it's not going to advantage people who are trying to fudge a solution - these people will simply click the exact target anyway. At the very worst, it will slow down the game by thelengthof the patience bar, as if you really don't have a solution at all, you can wait for the patience bar to run out.

Please, for my sanity, can the Numbers Rounds be changed so that you automatically declare the exact target (and thus get a chance to enter your solution via the number-clicking) if you have otherwise made no declaration. (In other worse, you should automatically start in a position of declaring the exact target, and you have to type in the box to declare anything different.) This is because about 1 round in 100, I forget to click the target number when I've solved the round, thus scoring zero, invariably at some crucial moment. It's driving me absolutely crackers, and not in a positive way.

I can't see how there could be any opposition to autodeclaring the exact target, as it's not going to advantage people who are trying to fudge a solution - these people will simply click the exact target anyway. At the very worst, it will slow down the game by thelengthof the patience bar, as if you really don't have a solution at all, you can wait for the patience bar to run out.

It's a tricky one. The problem with auto-declaring is that it makes fudging an opt-out rather than an opt-in, which I suspect is currently enough to dissuade most people from trying it. It has been suggested before that the interface give you some kind of heads-up if you haven't declared anything with 5 or 10 seconds to go, and I don't know why I've never gotten around to doing this. That would seem to solve your problem most of the time.

The "most missed words" feature in Superstats is useful, but if you've played thousands of games over many months the list gets filled with words you used to miss but now have no trouble spotting. How about a "most missed words in your last N games" feature? Not sure what a sensible value for N would be - too high and it doesn't address the issue, too low and the statistics won't be significant enough to be any use. Perhaps 200?

Also, if we're digging up old feature requests, two things I'd really like to see are the tnetennba for offering a max that's spelt out in the selection, and updated Watchwords.

Charlie Reams wrote:It's a tricky one. The problem with auto-declaring is that it makes fudging an opt-out rather than an opt-in, which I suspect is currently enough to dissuade most people from trying it. It has been suggested before that the interface give you some kind of heads-up if you haven't declared anything with 5 or 10 seconds to go, and I don't know why I've never gotten around to doing this. That would seem to solve your problem most of the time.

Ta for the reply Charlie. I'd certainly welcome this, although for anything other than 1 large, I'm often not looking at the screen for most of the time. (I find it easier to do anything other than 1 large, with pencil and paper.) How it would work for Speed, I don't know. It might get a bit annoying if something flashed up after 5 seconds of a Speed round... or instantly in Bullet.

Of course, I'd still favour auto-declaration, but sounds like I'm not going to win that one. Many people - including me when I remember - routinely click the target as soon as it appears anyway, so personally I don't think it would lead to an increase in fudging.

Charlie Reams wrote:quote="Mark Deeks"]Innis's idea for Nasty Letters was to work in the No E's idea that I mentioned a few posts back. I think it's a good idea, as, as of right now, nasty letters are no different./quote]
The problem with that is that it would make the current high scores for any Nasty format with letters basically invincible.

You could just reclassify existing Nasty Numbers 15s and 9s as Old Nasty Numbers 15 Rounders and Old Nasty Numbers 9 Rounders, then start afresh with a new, nastier letters distribution. The old records would still be there in the stats, like when Hyper Numbers Attack went from 30 second rounds to 45 second rounds, all the old 30 second games are still in the database as "Old Hypernumbers Attacks".

Yeah, I guess. If I'm gonna do that I'd want to put a bit more effort into getting the new revision right, maybe making more substantial changes to the letter distribution. Will think about it.

Don't think it's a good idea, what about other languages? I suppose it could just remove the most common letter...

Charlie Reams wrote:quote="Mark Deeks"]Innis's idea for Nasty Letters was to work in the No E's idea that I mentioned a few posts back. I think it's a good idea, as, as of right now, nasty letters are no different./quote]
The problem with that is that it would make the current high scores for any Nasty format with letters basically invincible.

You could just reclassify existing Nasty Numbers 15s and 9s as Old Nasty Numbers 15 Rounders and Old Nasty Numbers 9 Rounders, then start afresh with a new, nastier letters distribution. The old records would still be there in the stats, like when Hyper Numbers Attack went from 30 second rounds to 45 second rounds, all the old 30 second games are still in the database as "Old Hypernumbers Attacks".

Yeah, I guess. If I'm gonna do that I'd want to put a bit more effort into getting the new revision right, maybe making more substantial changes to the letter distribution. Will think about it.

Don't think it's a good idea, what about other languages? I suppose it could just remove the most common letter...

Charlie Reams wrote:quote="Mark Deeks"]Innis's idea for Nasty Letters was to work in the No E's idea that I mentioned a few posts back. I think it's a good idea, as, as of right now, nasty letters are no different./quote]
The problem with that is that it would make the current high scores for any Nasty format with letters basically invincible.

You could just reclassify existing Nasty Numbers 15s and 9s as Old Nasty Numbers 15 Rounders and Old Nasty Numbers 9 Rounders, then start afresh with a new, nastier letters distribution. The old records would still be there in the stats, like when Hyper Numbers Attack went from 30 second rounds to 45 second rounds, all the old 30 second games are still in the database as "Old Hypernumbers Attacks".

Yeah, I guess. If I'm gonna do that I'd want to put a bit more effort into getting the new revision right, maybe making more substantial changes to the letter distribution. Will think about it.

Don't think it's a good idea, what about other languages? I suppose it could just remove the most common letter...

There seems to be an oddity when I play bots in a Conundrum Attack, in as much as I never get high difficulty conundrums. In fact, often most of the conundrums generated are exactly the same difficulty, never higher than 6/10.

Maybe these low difficulty conundrums appear as a result of the low rating of these 3 bots, but I thought that bot rating was supposed to be excluded in calculation of maximum permissible conundrum difficulty for Bot v Human games?

Any chance this could be changed? Otherwise, now that I've finished Ascension, I don't seem to have a way of playing a Conundrum Attack against a bot, with some difficult ones in?

Matt Bayfield wrote:There seems to be an oddity when I play bots in a Conundrum Attack, in as much as I never get high difficulty conundrums. In fact, often most of the conundrums generated are exactly the same difficulty, never higher than 6/10.

Maybe these low difficulty conundrums appear as a result of the low rating of these 3 bots, but I thought that bot rating was supposed to be excluded in calculation of maximum permissible conundrum difficulty for Bot v Human games?

Any chance this could be changed? Otherwise, now that I've finished Ascension, I don't seem to have a way of playing a Conundrum Attack against a bot, with some difficult ones in?

This may be by design to prevent people spamming CAs to practise difficult conundrums, I think Charlie may have mentioned this previously.

Request for an addition to the already jam-packed Statland: I'd be curious to see a leaderboard of the top 30 players who've declared the most valid 9s in Normal variant, ODE play, listing how many 9s they've declared. I have a feeling Innis will be top, but behind him, I'm not sure.

Possible extensions to this, depending on whether you want to massage the egos of specialist variant and foreign language players: leaderboards for most "12s in Hyper", "12s in Hypergoat", "12s in Hypertouch", "7s in Junior", "9s in CSW", "9s in <foreign language>".

Matt Bayfield wrote:Request for an addition to the already jam-packed Statland: I'd be curious to see a leaderboard of the top 30 players who've declared the most valid 9s in Normal variant, ODE play, listing how many 9s they've declared. I have a feeling Innis will be top, but behind him, I'm not sure.

Possible extensions to this, depending on whether you want to massage the egos of specialist variant and foreign language players: leaderboards for most "12s in Hyper", "12s in Hypergoat", "12s in Hypertouch", "7s in Junior", "9s in CSW", "9s in <foreign language>".

Nick Deller wrote:The variants help page is a bit behind the times and quite a few of the newer variants aren't described. Is an update planned at some point?

Reading the "declare reversed" section on that page reminded me of something. Why is it that on apterous the person who picks the letters normally declares first, when it's the other way round on Countdown?

Could be that the picker used to declare first. ISTR one of the Deses saying "Fred, you picked them, so how many?" If so, I'm going to conjecture that it changed to rebalance the game - declaring second is a potential advantage, so the person who only gets to pick one numbers game should be the one to declare second in six rounds to the other player's five.

Just posting some things that have been emailed to me so I can have them all in the same place. Not necessarily implying that I advocate these.

Giles Hutchings wrote:
I was wondering whether you could do something about the bronze, silver and normal pencils, because on the Items page all three of these link to the same URL with the same table with the same Matt B on the top. Could you make them into their 3 separate categories so one can see the person with the most silver pencils, rather than them altogether? I've been pencil hunting lately with that very helpful list and I think I have quite a few silvers now. Also, for the home page, could there be the most recent English pencils in its own table, rather than being together with the other languages? It's just English pencils are now quite sought after (by me!) and there seems to be hundreds of other pencils from Welsh and French et al. getting rid of the English ones.

Giles Hutchings wrote:
I've noticed that one receives silver pencils in both normal variants and the Touch Jnr. variants, but not for the normal Junior one, where one still gets a normal pencil.

Perhaps Junior could now have silver pencils too?

Anglo-Italian wrote:
In the record of the game where we can comment and consider for GOTW, it would be useful if a symbol or phrase came up automatically to signify:

THIS WAS FRED'S PERSONAL BEST
PRISCILLA SET A NEW APTEROUS RECORD/HIGH SCORE
and others that the programme can recognise.

In Foreign Languages, and probably elsewhere, it would be fun to flag:

THIS GAME BROKE THE RECORD FOR THE MOST MAXES/PENCILS IN THIS FORMAT.
This may also lead to more players focusing on that as a target, and fewer meaningless games when playing a bot and failing early on.

PBs especially important, though, as this can involve absolutely everyone.

There are so many formats that few of us can understand the importance of all games nominated, and looking back at the history it would also be interesting.

Giles Hutchings wrote:
I was wondering whether you could do something about the bronze, silver and normal pencils, because on the Items page all three of these link to the same URL with the same table with the same Matt B on the top. Could you make them into their 3 separate categories so one can see the person with the most silver pencils, rather than them altogether? I've been pencil hunting lately with that very helpful list and I think I have quite a few silvers now. Also, for the home page, could there be the most recent English pencils in its own table, rather than being together with the other languages? It's just English pencils are now quite sought after (by me!) and there seems to be hundreds of other pencils from Welsh and French et al. getting rid of the English ones.

Could we also have a link on the bottom of the Latest Pencils that says 'See all recent pencils' which links to a page which has all the pencils got in the last week, in the same format as the homepage one.

On leaderboards with the top 30 players or whatever, I think it would be interesting for it to say how many players there are that meet the criteria for inclusion. If it's under 30, it's obvious, but if there are 30 on the list, someone in 30th won't be sure if that's any good or not.

1) Number of letters in a letters round
2) Number of numbers in a numbers round and number of numbers in the target number
3) Number of letters in a conundrum round

There'd probably need to be a cap for each of these. If it were applicable across all languages and variants (as everything else is in the custom game menu), then the letters would probably have to be capped by variant. I'm sure there are huge problems implementing some or all of these, but the letters round customisation could open up the entire lexicon without having to make official superhyper and megahyper variants or whatever (18 and 21 letters etc.).

If you could make just the Normal variant have a customisable number of letters in a letters round (obviously 7, 8, 9 and 12 are already available), that would be really cool.